Peter De Vries (1913-1990), a quaintly heterosexual novelist who thrived in the—as he might say—muddle of the 20th century, is well on his way to being forgotten.

One after another he turned out books that critics refused to take seriously, in part because they were so funny.

De Vries never met a cliché he couldn’t improve on, a pun he couldn’t master, an epigram he couldn’t polish to perfection.

Apparently it is in the epigrams that he is to live. A few of them have for some time been such a part of the cultural mainstream that nobody even thinks about who said them first ("Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be").

Recently feeling a strong need to laugh, I bought the first eight novels through alibris.com (all the books are out of print). I had read them in my youth and remembered laughing a lot.

They dribbled into my mailbox one at a time from used booksellers all over North America, and I start reading.

Second time through, decades later, I again laughed a lot.

But sadly, if you asked me now what any of the novels were about, I’d be hard put to give you specifics. The gags come so thick and fast that the story—and the characters—hold little lasting interest.

With a few exceptions of course. There’s, for example, Chick Swallow, the self-styled poet manqué, who turns up in more than one book. Best of all is the eponymous main character of The Mackerel Plaza, the Reverend Andrew Mackerel, pastor of the People’s Liberal Church (a simple structure containing a coffee bar, a dance floor, a bowling alley, with a small area in one corner set aside for worship) in a slightly fictionalized version of Westport, Connecticut.

And De Vries could do very funny, large-scale set pieces. He spends a good third of one novel getting the plot ducks lined up just right so that the protagonist, after attending a funeral he doesn’t really want to be at, tries to cut out of the line of cars on the way to the cemetery, with the result that the entire procession follows him as he wends his way home and then, having become aware of what’s happened, as he tries to lose them.

Much of the humor is sharp, incisive social commentary:

"In the press of a cocktail party everyone is in bas-relief. Friends lose a dimension; their talk, nervously disbursed for quick consumption, becomes all surface in a way that curiously drains them of characterization. Familiarity is undone—even one’s wife appears at times a chattering alien. With strangers the trick is reversed. Having nothing previous to go by, you take a face value what account they give of themselves, and out of small details erect a character, for whatever it may be worth in accuracy."

But having laughed and laughed, you come away from the novels as from a Chinese meal: In another hour, you’re hungry again.

As he aged, the humor became sharper, harsher, and verged finally into more or less unbridled cynicism. One book, The Blood of the Lamb, written after his young daughter died of leukemia, stands alone as a cry of total despair in the face of a pain-filled, uncaring universe.

After that, flashes of the young De Vries recurred as he continued to write, but the best was behind him. And the best of that was the epigrams and short comic bits. Here are the ones I bagged as I made my way through the first eight novels.

What is chastity but an overemphasis on sex?

It’s all right for two people to rush into marriage,
but divorce is a step that should be taken seriously.

The human species is the only one that is devoured by its young.

Limitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that
he need not exist in order to save us.

Let us hope that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring. We know thou hast a difficulty for every solution, but also that the obstacles put in our way are in the end to our spiritual good—stumbling blocks which, if we cannot convert them into stepping stones, leave us unworthy to be called sons of God, much less to be saved, even by the skin of our teeth. But do give us relief from the troubles and calamities under which we have been groaning, for Christ’s sake!

A child’s misunderstanding of a Christmas carol:
    "Oh well, oh well,
      Oh well, oh we-ell,
      Born is the King of Israel."

The common people must have loved gods.
They made so many of them.

It’s easy enough for a man to love his enemies.
The question is whether he can forgive his benefactors.

Mme. Piquepuss [the awesome grande-mère of the lass whom the protagonist is wooing] was looking toward the bay window in which I sat. There were several wasps in the room, some of which had settled on the curtain there. She rose, glancing up at the ceiling as for some opening in the wall through which they might have made their entry. Picking up an enormous pair of shears from a table, she stole over to the curtain without disturbing the insects. Deftly, she slipped one of the blades under a wasp and cut it in two. She did this with a couple of others before the remaining few took wing and dispersed.
"I can’t stand to swat things any more, she said, returning to her chair. "I suppose we mellow as we get older."

Life is a tragedy perpetuated by the passion that relieves it.

All the world’s a stage—in our development.

Sargent gives us still lifes of people.
Cézanne gives us portraits of apples.

Life is in the end a soap opera. It is not Hamlet writhing in a skein of verse, nor the View of Toledo, nor even the Eroica. It is Beethoven going deaf, Joyce blind. It is the newlyweds in New Jersey colliding with another car ten minutes after the marriage and the bride wailing over the body of her groom, "Oh, my God! I’m a wife and a widow in one day!"

We fall in love with a personality,
but we must live with a character.

We’re not primarily put on this earth to see through
one another, but to see one another through.

When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes,
I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination.
But the combination is locked up in the safe.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children
but that children produce adults.

Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

If it must be Thomas, let it be Mann, and if it must be Wolfe,
let it be Nero, but never let it be Thomas Wolfe.